Conrad Bastable (@ConradBastable) / X

Conrad Bastable

10.1K posts

Conrad Bastable

@ConradBastable

Black and white and read all over. Building things. Writing things. Winning things.

New Hampshire | San Francisco

conradbastable.com/essays

Joined January 2014

Pinned
Conrad Bastable
@ConradBastable
Apr 3, 2025
NEW ESSAY: Forsaking Industrialism: The Most Expensive Thing You Didn’t Buy. Europe had leverage and squandered it, fueling China’s rise while gutting its own industry. Why tariffs can't save you, VC hates hardware, and the post-industrial dream grinds the middle class to dust.
82K
Conrad Bastable
@ConradBastable
May 26, 2025
If you work in tech, go to your nearest Best Buy (google it, it’s a store for normal people) and buy a $500 windows laptop made by a legacy vendor. Not a Chromebook. Go through the 60m setup flow full of SaaS ads. Feel it lag when you press Start. Experience notification hell.
alex fazio
@alxfazio
May 25, 2025
tfw you find out that the start menu in windows 11 is literally a react native application that causes a spike in cpu usage every time you press the start button
1.8M
Conrad Bastable
@ConradBastable
Jul 2, 2024
Replying to @gbrl_dick
Doing a victory lap round the kitchen because *obviously* “lala” means “water”
94K
Conrad Bastable
@ConradBastable
Aug 15, 2025
I think my son’s life outcomes should be shaped by who his dad is.
Laurie Macfarlane
@L__Macfarlane
Aug 12, 2025
Inheritance tax isn’t “theft” from those who have built a “successful life and legacy”. It is a tax on those receiving a windfall of unearned wealth. It’s not “immoral” unless you think people’s life chances should be determined not by what they do — but who their parents are.
245K
Conrad Bastable
@ConradBastable
Jan 13, 2024
"What does he mean, there were no trees in the UK?" You pull up satellite imagery to reassure yourself that there are in fact trees in England. You pause, staring at the map. Why is it all a pale shade of farmland greenery? Where are all the trees?! Let's look...
Overeducated Gibbon
@MostlyMonkey
Jan 12, 2024
Replying to @bryancsk
Similar story in the UK. Timber for shipbuilding had begun to be tough to acquire
1.3M
Conrad Bastable
@ConradBastable
May 26, 2025
Replying to @ConradBastable
For $500 and two hours of your life, you can unlock deep user empathy and radicalize yourself against your fellow devs.
Conrad Bastable
@ConradBastable
Jun 6, 2024
Replying to @ConradBastable
The operating system now has “notifications” like mobile, turned on by default for every app, all used to spam you with alerts to Try, Buy, Update, look look look! I used to think Stallman was a nut. Then I bought a new Windows PC.
151K
Conrad Bastable
@ConradBastable
Mar 1, 2024
If you follow the right twitter anons, you can front run the latest academic research by 6+ months.
Quantіan
@quantian1
Aug 7, 2023
Replying to @quantian1
So let's re-estimate the model, then, and figure out what changed. The answer is that three major things changed: consumers care a lot less about unemployment than they did, prefer housing prices to fall rather than rise now, and, more than anything else, HATE high interest rates
218K
Conrad Bastable
@ConradBastable
Jul 26, 2023
It always surprises me how gleeful non-STEM grads are to subject engineering students to a course load that's 25% humanities. The reverse is never true -- I don't think liberal arts colleges should subject students to Thermodynamics & E&M!
Conrad Bastable
@ConradBastable
Jul 26, 2023
Replying to @namalhotra and @reznavajo
What I disliked about MIT was that to graduate with a MechE degree, you have to take 8 semesters worth of humanities courses!
1.9M
Conrad Bastable
@ConradBastable
May 26, 2025
Replying to @ConradBastable
Someone coded all these things. Someone sat there and build unit tests against a PRD for “endlessly annoy, manipulate, harass, and attempt to con paying customers into giving us more money and/or obstructing their attempt to use our proud.” I am not controlling the computer.
38K
Conrad Bastable
@ConradBastable
Jan 13, 2024
Replying to @ConradBastable
everywhere you look in the entire country of England looks like that lovely pale shade of green, "England's pleasant pastures," because it's been farmed for a thousand years any "forest" exists only because of royal hunting decrees (which caused riots) or modern planting.
65K
Conrad Bastable
@ConradBastable
May 26, 2025
Replying to @ConradBastable
Every time I open my video editing software, I get a new popup to X out of. No, I do not want a “TOUR!” of your new features. If I do, I’ll watch a guide on YouTube. Please. Stop hijacking my software.
47K
Conrad Bastable
@ConradBastable
May 26, 2025
Replying to @ConradBastable
My new car had a recall issued on one component (software related emergency braking). I took it to the dealer to update the software. Now every time it starts the whole dash is dimmed until I X out of an ad for Sirius XM radio that blocks the top 15% of the screen.
44K
Conrad Bastable
@ConradBastable
Jul 26, 2023
Replying to @ConradBastable
"take your humanities, anon, it's good for you!"
4.3M
Conrad Bastable
@ConradBastable
May 26, 2025
Replying to @ConradBastable
It won’t necessarily immediately change your whole perspective on societal development through technology and the tradeoffs present in competitive vs monopolistic markets. But. You know. It might make you start to ask questions.
Conrad Bastable
@ConradBastable
Jul 25, 2024
NEW ESSAY: Monetization & Monopolies: How The Internet You Loved Died. A longform essay about how Tech monopolies create the conditions necessary for civilizational progress as well as for their own demise! Half a celebration of progress, half a lamentation of tragedy.
125K